Cover

LIFE IN

A JUNGLE

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

BRUCE GROBBELAAR

LIFE IN

A JUNGLE

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

BRUCE GROBBELAAR

WITH RAGNHILD LUND ANSNES

images

First published as a hardback by deCoubertin Books Ltd in 2018.

First Edition

deCoubertin Books, 46B Jamaica Street, Baltic Triangle, Liverpool, L1 0AF.

www.decoubertin.co.uk

eISBN: 978-1-909245-57-0

Copyright © Bruce Grobbelaar, 2018

The right of Bruce Grobbelaar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be left liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design and typeset by Leslie Priestley.

Printed and bound by Jellyfish.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by the way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it was published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for photographs used in this book. If we have overlooked you in any way, please get in touch so that we can rectify this in future editions.

To my parents,

Beryl Eunice and Hendrik Gabriel Grobbelaar

and my stepfather

Denys Davis, the gentle giant.

They all had a part of my upbringing

but only my mother had

sole guidance to whom I am today.

Contents

List of Illustrations

1 Pegged to the Ground

2 Running Away from Home

3 The Witch Doctor

4 The Stick Leader

5 The Bush War

6 Saved by Football

7 The Green Mamba

8 A Football Gypsy

9 To Liverpool on a £1 Bet

10 In at the Deep End

11 The Clown Prince

12 Match Days

13 Falling in Love

14 European Ride

15 Everton

16 Heysel

17 The Nature of Goalkeeping

18 Winning Mentality

19 Hillsborough

20 Closure of a Painful Spring

21 The Last Title

22 Kenny Resigns

23 The Souness Battle

24 Southampton

25 The Sting

26 Vincent

27 Tapped

28 Arrested

29 The Relief

30 Hinterlands

31 Football’s Trial of the Century?

32 Journeyman

33 Groundhog Day

34 From Darkness into Light

35 The Dream Team

36 Exiled

37 Afterword

Acknowledgments

Index

Illustrations

List of Illustrations

That’s me, bottom row second from right.

Prepping for school with my kid brother.

Mum and dad happily married.

Dad looking less than happy with me.

On patrol with my stick in the Bush War.

Returning home, such a relief.

Learning my trade at Matabeleland Highlanders as the only white player in the team.

Honing my skills in the garden.

Signing for Vancouver Whitecaps.

Winning trophies became a feature of life.

The big jump to Liverpool, where handstands continued as a feature of my performance.

Racing cars at Silverstone with Alan Kennedy and Terry McDermott.

Back in Zimbabwe, flying planes.

Standing in front of beautiful waterfalls.

On tour with the Liverpool boys. Don’t worry, Sammy Lee is wearing trunks…

Enjoying a cup of tea with Phil Neal and Ronnie Whelan.

They claim this is meant to revitalise your skin…

Entering Dante’s Inferno, otherwise known as Rome in May 1984 – a night that would define my sporting career.

We would win on penalties and my ‘spaghetti legs’ would prove crucial.

With the boys of the Boot Room: Joe Fagan, Roy Evans and the ferocious Ronnie Moran.

Winning the league at Chelsea and embracing first with Mark Lawrenson

Winning the league at Chelsea and embracing with the rest of the lads.

After clashing with Jim Beglin in the FA Cup final, we would take the double.

My flamboyant side shining through once again, whether it be at the Milk Cup final or one of the legendary Christmas parties.

They said I was a clown, so I became one.

Hillsborough was followed by another FA Cup final win over Everton as well as Michael Thomas’s injury time winner for Arsenal, which gave them the league title.

Liverpool’s last league title in 1990.

Wearing a face mask would be the least of my problems at Southampton.

Passport problems denied me playing more games for Zimbabwe but beating Cameroon in a qualifier for the 1994 World Cup was one of the highlights.

Three court cases and football’s trial of the century.

Back where it all began in Zimbabwe at David Livingstone school.

Coaching at Ottawa Fury.

With my eldest daughters Tahli (left) and Olivia (right) (Courtesy of Mary Evans).

At home in Newfoundland with my second wife Karen and my daughter, Rotém.

1

Pegged to the Ground

AT THE RAYLTON SPORTS CLUB AMONG THE ELEGANT, TREE-LINED Avenues of Rhodesia’s capital, Salisbury, I found myself tied between two poles at the back of my dad’s goal. It was Saturday afternoon, the focal point of the week. My mother was playing hockey on an adjacent field and my dad was keeping goal in the football match. I could only run three metres back and forth – so most of the time I would sit and study his movements in front of the goal. I was a child of two goalies: my dad minded the goal when playing football and was a cricket wicketkeeper too; meanwhile my mother was a hockey keeper. In other words, I was literally born to be a goalkeeper.

*

Life consists of many challenges and my family took on a big one when I was just two months old, moving from Durban in South Africa to Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia. My father had been a driver of double-decker buses in South Africa and moved north to Rhodesia when a position on the railways became available. It was December 1957 and we all held South African passports, which presented some hurdles to pass before Rhodesian citizenship was granted the following year. Although I’d live in South Africa again on several different occasions, Rhodesia, later to be named Zimbabwe, became and remained my country.

My father, Hendrik Gabriel Grobbelaar, was the youngest of eleven brothers. He was a very handsome man. His eyes were hazel, which is the same colour as a lion’s – half-brown and half-green, or like the colour of the grass in springtime in the savannah. He had a full head of dark hair. My dad was just a very free-living man, a Casanova who enjoyed his women, smokes and alcohol. He was always well dressed in trousers and a shirt. The only time I saw him in shorts was in sports outfits, either playing tennis, football or cricket. He was an accomplished sportsman and also played baseball and lawn bowls.

My mother, Beryl Eunice, was a stunning lady of five foot six. She made her dark hair wavy, had a straight nose, really pretty teeth and dark-brown eyes; that’s where I got my eyes. She was the eldest of three girls. She dressed very elegantly and I remember the smart skirts she used to wear for her work as the accountant for a shoe store. She was very good at her job and later she opened up two shoe shops of her own in Bulawayo.

My family was vast. I had more than 70 first cousins whose roots stretched across southern Africa’s colonial past. Many had fought on opposing sides in the Boer War, six decades before my birth. My father was born in the Transvaal and was a proud Boer. My mother descended from a Welsh Fusilier stationed in Cape Town Castle with his wife, my great-grandmother, during the Boer War. She was originally from the island of St Helena. She had given birth to my grandfather, Edward Ernest Banning, in Cape Town Castle and because it was designated ‘home soil’ it would give me and my siblings a claim on British citizenship.

Having left for Rhodesia, we lived in Sinoia (now Chinhoyi) for three months before moving on to Salisbury, the capital city now known as Harare. Including my grandparents, we lived in two garden apartments on Baker Avenue, which is today Nelson Mandela Avenue. I was the middle child so I found out early that I had to fend for myself. My mother had become a parent aged 28 and she bonded tightly with her first born, my sister Jacqueline Bridget. I came along two years later, then eight years after me my brother Mark Edward arrived – and he was my mother’s little baby throughout our childhoods. Mum, of course, would only address us by our first and middle names when we were in trouble. I can still hear her now: ‘Come here, Jacqueline Bridget…’ It became a feature of our childhoods.

My first language was Afrikaans, and I spoke nothing else until I was seven. In the house we only spoke Afrikaans, as my Afrikaner father didn’t allow us to speak English. That was his rule. My mother on the other hand was English-speaking, so when we started at school, the rule changed and she allowed us to speak English at home. After that, I didn’t speak Afrikaans too often. I still remember it, even though I am a little rusty.

When I was six, we moved to another apartment. The same smells were always there: the vendors cooking mieles, or corn porridge, on the side of the roads on a fire drum in the dark or being boiled in big pots. That smell and the one of wood fires always take me right back to Rhodesia and my first years.

I loved the hustle and bustle of the place. The Avenues, the suburb of Salisbury where we lived, was a very Americanised place. The streets were one-way and avenues went across the other way in a grid system like in New York. So all the streets go east to west and the avenues go north to south. The city is absolutely beautiful in spring, because of the jacaranda trees. October, the height of spring in the southern hemisphere, has always been the best month to see Salisbury, as the avenues going to the city centre are covered in purple flowers.

Just to the south of the city was the Chitungwiza township. West was Arcadia, the industrial area of the city and the main black area. Due north was Mount Pleasant and to the east, the Borrowdale horse racing course. The nicest houses were in the northeast. We were living just outside the city on the south side. That was until my father developed Buerger’s disease, an inflammation of the arteries and veins attributed to smoking. The pain, caused by a limited bloody supply to his legs, was troubling him, so he went to South Africa to have an operation when I was seven. My mother decided we were all returning to South Africa with him and we settled in Benoni, an old gold-mining town outside of Johannesburg, renowned for its lakes and horse stables.

I was enrolled at Rynfield Junior English School and it meant I was able to play football. In Benoni there was a junior Afrikaans school and a junior English school, and despite only speaking Afrikaans up to that point, I started going to the English school, which would prove vital for my football career. Had I gone to the Afrikaans school, I’d have played rugby instead.

We were in Benoni for about eighteen months and our neighbourhood was a real blue-collar place, with bungalow houses. Behind our backyard there was a big field we had to cross on our way to school. The only problem was that field was full of blue crane birds, and if the blue crane was bigger than you, it would chase you across the field and attempt to peck at you. The only ways to prevent an attack were by either carrying a broomstick or growing up fast.

*

AFTER MY FATHER’S OPERATION AND RECUPERATION WE RETURNED to Rhodesia. The Raylton Sports Club became the centre of our social lives. In the club you could play tennis, snooker, football, baseball, lawn bowls and hockey. It became the routine for the whole family during the week: work or school followed by an evening at the sports club. We’d be there at weekends too, only breaking away on a Sunday for dinner at three o’clock in the afternoon. Even now, when I think of my mum, I think of her dressed in white, because white was the colour of her sports outfits. She looked like a doctor. She was very busy and worked hard – and then she relaxed at the sports club, as she was just as sporty as my dad. Having the club just round the corner from our home made it easy for my parents to enjoy their sports.

On a Saturday, the games would be competitive, and the different sports took place simultaneously. My dad would play football and my mum hockey. The substitutes on my mum’s hockey team took care of my sister, Jacqueline, on the sidelines, while I was pegged to the ground behind my dad when I was very young. He was my hero as a goalkeeper. I watched him over and over again, studying him. I watched other Rhodesian goalkeepers play, those competing against my father, but none of them appeared to be as good as him. It was only when my father introduced me to a film about Lev Yashin, the great Soviet Union goalkeeper, that I realised my father was not, in fact, the greatest goalkeeper in the world.

*

WE HAD A HOUSEBOY CALLED LUMICK. HE AND HIS FAMILY LIVED IN a small house at the back of the garden, called a kia. It was more of a concrete hut with a corrugated roof. When it rained the metal made a tremendous noise.

Lumick had two sons called Fanwere and Gordon. After school I used to go and eat food with them, and this way I learned a lot about the culture of the Rhodesian black man. Lumick cooked for our family because my mother was at work all the time. He would be given instructions what to buy, and routinely African boys made a stew. So stew it was. He would do a fish stew, beef stew, or a pork stew, with onions and garlic. Later, my stepfather taught Lumick how to make goulash. Whenever I went to Lumick’s kia at lunchtime, it was half a loaf of bread for us each and one bottle of Coca-Cola, and that’s what we ate – bread and coke. For dinner, he would say, ‘Oh, we’ve got something special for dinner.’ Another stew? ‘Yes…’

We considered Lumick almost as part of our family. When we left for that spell in Benoni he had wept at our departure and we were all equally as sad. He had, of course, been unable to join us because of South Africa’s stringent apartheid laws.

Rhodesia wasn’t quite an apartheid state, but there was racial segregation and we were taught at school that there was a fundamental difference between white and black people, that we were superior. Integration was not encouraged.

Perhaps the situation in Rhodesia had more in common with the American Deep South than what was going on across the border in South Africa: Africans were not welcomed in white bars or restaurants. In cinemas a black man could show a white man to a seat but not sit in it himself. The rules on public transport followed a similar pattern. In Rhodesia, white and black men could sit on the same buses but the white man would be at the front and the black man at the back. In South Africa, there were white buses and there were black buses. In Rhodesia there were much higher standards in white schools than black ones, meaning that social and economic divisions were reinforced over time. But if black parents had enough money to send one of their children to a good school, it was possible to get in – unlike in South Africa, where the divide influenced every part of life.

I had no choice in where I was born and brought up and knew no better. It was accepted as normal. The sight of Lumick and his children walking around with no possessions wasn’t a shock because I knew nothing else. It was only later, through travel and experience, that I learned that this was all wrong.

*

‘PACK YOUR STUFF, WE’RE LEAVING!’

One day out of the blue, our mother told us the news that would change our family forever. With no warning whatsoever, my father had decided he wanted a new life, and he left us. He had met someone else. I was ten, my baby brother Mark was two and my sister twelve.

As much as this was a massive shock to us, I knew my mother and father weren’t getting on. He used to have wild parties with the hockey and football groups at the sports club. They fought. He drank and smoked, even though he was told not to by doctors because of his Buerger’s disease. One day I heard my mother say, ‘If you want this woman, you go…’

After my parents split all of a sudden I was transformed into a father figure for my brother. I had to look after him. I changed his nappies. They were the old-style towelling nappies, which you have to fold and put a pin into on either side to keep everything in place.

My mum was the only one who got divorced in her family so it wasn’t an easy time for her. She grew up as a Catholic and it was compromising for her in the first place when she chose to marry my father, a Dutch Reform Afrikaner. Trying to find a place where they could marry had been a challenge. It proved easier for her to convert to Anglicanism and so they got married as Anglicans.

Finding out my mother was so strong at such a young age opened my eyes. Other women had always flocked around my dad, and he stepped over the line. Not just drinking beer. He smoked marijuana and there could have been other things my mother didn’t like. Seeing my mother go through such a hard time, how she had to struggle to get a new home to live in, was my life’s first real disappointment. But she was very determined, wanting to carry on with the same enthusiasm as before. Three children had to be fed, clothed and put through school. She knuckled down and became our hero.

We went to Dave Crommer’s home. He was a friend from the sports club and taught me how to play cricket. He was much older than my mother and I knew him as ‘Uncle’. He gave my mother two bedrooms of his house so we could get by – my father’s departure had left her high and dry and unable to afford the flat we had lived in. Dave was a widower, so he took my mother in. He had played cricket for Rhodesia as a spin bowler – and he asked me what position I played. I told him I was a wicketkeeper, and a batsman. He guided me and my cricketing improved a lot. Dave was a fantastic person. His kindness showed me that not every man was like my dad.

Gradually, my mother was able to put away money through her bookkeeping job. Getting a new flat was a sign she was back on her feet again. It was a white concrete duplex in The Avenues: 99 Livingstone Avenue. Downstairs there was a lounge on the left, and a balcony overlooking the street straight in front of you. Upstairs, there was a main bedroom and three smaller bedrooms, and then a shower and bathroom. My mum decorated the place and she had a lot of plants, which brightened it up and made it feel homely.

The flat was only 200 metres from my primary school, the David Livingstone School. It’s a black area now but back then it was a middle-to-poor all-white area.

Unfortunately for Lumick, our houseboy, there was no longer any accommodation for him because the block of flats had no outside space. He ended up living a few blocks away with a friend, cycling to work every day.

There were plenty of kids around and we played on the streets. We went in the drainpipes under the roads. There were rats, snakes and other creatures. Some street kids of my age used to sleep down there, unless it rained, when the pipes would rapidly fill up with water.

I only had one pair of shoes when I went to junior school so when I came home, Lumick used to take my shoes off me: ‘Right, outside, barefoot!’ This was to save them for school or any special occasion like when we went into town. It meant playing football in bare feet, going to the sports ground barefoot, riding your bike barefoot. Though eventually, when I started playing proper games, my mother bought me a pair of hand-me-down football boots. And so, my childhood was largely spent barefoot.

My parents still went to the same sports club, still drank in the same bar – but on opposite sides of the room. The Raylton Sports Club was now a ten-minute bicycle ride away. The journey involved navigating your way through streets where dogs would chase the bikes. You had to pick your route carefully. Once, a Doberman bit me and it got a good whack with a baseball bat when its teeth sank into my legs.

Until I was allowed to drink at eighteen, I used to wait outside the bar of the sports club and play in the swimming pool area, hoping my dad would come out and talk to me, since he never visited us in our new home. Yet my old man never came. Later, when I was old enough to enter the bar, conversations would be brief. I was desperate to see more of him, I missed him, like anybody would miss their dad. But he wouldn’t stick around long and, soon enough, he’d return to his game of snooker or shoot off to work.

Despite my wanting him in my life, I was also angry that he’d left us. He had been my role model and hero. He had let us down. My younger brother was too young to appreciate the impact but my sister and I felt a void. We reacted by rebelling.

2

Running Away from Home

WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN, MY MOTHER GOT A NEW BOYFRIEND AND I didn’t like him. They were in the same circle of friends in the sports club. He was a recluse, sat by himself; and my mother, being my mother, would go and speak to him because she was the caring type. He had dark hair, rimmed glasses, medium build; he was an average sportsman and dressed like an office worker. I was angry because she was going out with a man that I didn’t want her to be with; meanwhile my father had married a new woman, Rene, and had started a second family, settling in a little farming community in the Eastern Highlands, towards the border with Mozambique.

All these years later I realise that my mother was in a bad place at the time. She had three kids. My sister was fifteen and about to get pregnant. I was thirteen and for the first time dealing with the flood of hormones that hits teenage boys go through. I, of course, didn’t see that. Instead, I thought to myself, Hey, I’m out of here.

At eleven-thirty on a Friday night, I came back from the sports club and decided to write a note, placing it on my mother’s bed while she was sleeping. I climbed down the drainpipe, went out on the main road and hitchhiked from there, catching a bus that black people used, then a taxi, eventually taking me the 230 kilometres to Inyazura where my father lived.

The greeting there was not the one I expected. Rene, my father’s new wife, answered the door at 3:30am. ‘There is your bed,’ she said. A few hours later, my father came into the room, shouting: ‘Get up!’ Outside, he tied me to a tree, beating my backside with six strokes using a hose, saying words that I’ll never forget: ‘Don’t ever do that to your mother again! Your mother brought you into this world. I helped, but your mother is the one you don’t disrespect ever again.’ And I haven’t. Those words are still with me now.

It wasn’t the first time I endured corporal punishment at the hands of my father. Beatings were his way, though only if we were really naughty. We were brought up with the cane or the strap. ‘Go into my cupboard and pick the belt you’re going to get hit with,’ he’d warn. ‘You’re going to be hit on your behind four times.’ Things that would qualify for a beating included lying and not being home for curfew. As soon as those street lights went on you had ten minutes to get back, otherwise you’d be picking a belt. It might shock some parents today but that’s how we grew up. My father came from a background where such punishment was routine. His family had been miners and manual labourers.

At school, the rules were the same. If you didn’t do your homework, you’d get summoned to the headmaster’s office where the girls would get a smack on their hands and the boys on their backside, only ten times harder.

Humiliation was another tactic. You would be called up in assembly on Monday morning in front of the school. The headmaster would stand there and say, ‘Right, after assembly I’d like to see Mr Bruce Grobbelaar at my office.’ There, the punishments would go up incrementally from two strikes of the cane to six. Once you were on six, you were always on six – whatever the offence. The cane would leave welts and if my mother ever saw a welt and find I’d misbehaved and been punished by the headmaster, I’d get punished by her as well. ‘Right, take the belt!’ and she would hit me straight on the welt, as a punishment for being punished. A double whammy!

Academically, my skills suited the sporting path I took. As a goalkeeper you need to be good at geometry – measuring distances and angles. You’ve got to get the distances right. Luckily, I was always good at maths. Maths was my favourite subject together with geography and history. You’ve got to know what happened in the past to make the world like it is today. You need to know your own family history, because that’s what shapes you.

My mother was from a nomadic family. Her father had fought in the Second World War and my great-grandfather was, of course, in the Fusiliers during the Boer War and had been stationed in Cape Town, where my grandfather was born. Grandfather played the saxophone and the trombone, and when the Boswell Wilkie Circus used to go on tour, he would travel with them, playing in the band. My grandmother and her daughters went with him, my mother being the eldest of three sisters. My mother’s family travelled around and if they liked somewhere, they would stay. I was a bit like that: a football gypsy. Though the game would dictate where I settled for long periods of time, I wasn’t afraid of moving.

For me, school became really fun when I played sport. I played rugby, athletics, basketball and I swam. But football always had priority – even over school work. When I signed up with Salisbury Callies when I was fourteen, I sometimes had to skip school to play for them as I occasionally had to travel quite far to get to away games. Luckily I was being paid to play at that stage, so it made being called into the office to get a smack on the backside for missing lessons a little more bearable.

*

MORE PAIN WAS WAITING. AFTER I RAN AWAY, MY MOTHER TOLD HER new boyfriend he was not the one for her. They had been seeing each other for six months. So this person who I didn’t like disappeared. No longer on the scene. I thought nothing of it until years later when my mother told me what had actually happened. Devastated by her rejection, he had ended up shooting himself a couple of weeks later. It was so hard on my mother having to live with that.

Meanwhile, my dad still worked on the railways. He was hard-working and had been a good sportsman, but his health problems were starting to curtail him.

Nevertheless, his passion for football remained. I remember him encouraging me to go and watch a game that involved the local police in Yasura. I remember it because next to the field was bushland. When a lion appeared, everyone ran away and jumped on the bus carrying the away team. Some perched on the roof. The lion was tamed by a marksman with a tranquilliser and after that, the game recommenced.

Following my surprise arrival on my dad’s doorstep after running away from home, I had a few days’ holiday with him and he then put me in a boarding school in Umtali, now called Mutare, right on the border with Mozambique.

After six weeks at the school, I turned yellow. It was jaundice. I was sent back to stay with my father and stepmother. Though jaundice isn’t contagious, unfortunately my father didn’t have such medical understanding – so I was left to sleep on the porch. My whole body was in pain. The doctor came and gave me an injection and told me to drink lots of fluids – so I got orange juice. I was off school for about three weeks, and when I got better, my father put me on the train back home to my mother in Salisbury, where my mother’s friend Denys Davies picked me up. He took me to the hospital, got me checked over and made sure I was OK and then drove me home, where my mother was waiting. Did I disappoint her? Yes, I probably did. When you’re thirteen and you leave a message explaining that you’ve run away to live with your father, it must hurt. Yet she forgave me, as good parents do.

I went back to my old school and it was the same old routine. Riding my bicycle for five miles to training and another five miles back. Jacqueline, my fifteen-year-old sister, became a parent in the same period and soon after would marry her boyfriend, Joe Roy, a singer in a rock band. He developed a liking for the Mormon faith – he was what we called a ‘Bush Mormon’, which meant he smoked, drank and swore and went to church when he felt guilty. He was a long-haired hippie-type and played the guitar, singing with his sister Bunny in the bars around Salisbury like Le Coq d’Or and La Boheme. He was not the sort of character my strait-laced family would have approved of, but what did they know? Today, nearly fifty years on, he is still happily married to my sister, and his rock’n’roll days are long behind him. Now he is a bishop in the Mormon Church.

Back then, with a pregnant daughter, a tearaway son and a toddler, it meant lots of pressure and lots of stress on my mother. Being a single parent in Rhodesia was no easy thing, but she took it in her stride. She carried on with her life and her friendship with Denys became something more. Denys Davies looked a little bit like Bob Paisley in appearance, with light-brown hair going grey, combed to one side. He loved working on trucks and was a mechanic, with a son and two daughters from his previous marriage, and he proved to be one of the nicest blokes you could ever meet. It was only after my mum got together with Denys that everything calmed down. He was a huge stabilising influence on me. Finally my anger faded. I had to be the man of the house before he joined us, and that was hard.

One day, returning from a cricket game for a team called Mount Pleasant, dressed in my whites, I found an empty house. I went to the back of the garden to ask Lumick where my family was. ‘Don’t worry; they’ll be home soon. Go and get changed into these clothes,’ he said. He presented me with a nice shirt, shorts, long socks and shoes.

‘What do you mean? These are good clothes.’

‘Yes; your mother told me to put you in these clothes.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Don’t worry, your mother is coming.’

Next minute, my sister walked through the door with Gillian, Denys’s daughter and her best friend school, and they were dressed up all nicely. ‘Sorry you missed it, Bruce.’

‘What do you mean, missed it?’

‘Oh,’ Gill says, ‘your mother just married my father!’

In walked my mother. ‘Hello, Mum.’

She turns around and says with a smile, ‘Meet your new dad!’

‘Oh, nice; you didn’t even tell me.’

Denys said: ‘Why would we want to tell you? We knew that you had to go and play cricket, so we let you go and play. How did you do?’

‘We won.’

‘Well done!’

We jumped into the car and went to Raylton Sports Club to have a few drinks and celebrate. I had just turned fourteen when Denys and Mum got married. While I was out playing cricket all their other kids had been present, not that I minded. I thought it was quite funny and had to laugh, because I was happy from winning the cricket game and when I came back I had got a new dad.

*

I GREW UP HAVING A LOT OF FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY. I WAS also very fit. I’d ride my bike five miles to school, five miles back, then another ten miles in total there and back if the day involved a sports match.

Sports consumed me. I loved my sport and I excelled in everything. I was obsessed with sports because they gave me freedom while keeping me off the streets. If you didn’t have much, stealing and doing drugs was common. Some friends in my neighbourhood started smoking, drinking and taking marijuana; dagga – that’s the local slang for it. I got offered all sorts of drugs growing up. I never took it except when I was in the army, just to keep me awake. Some friends I’ve known for a long, long time are not very well now because they went down the wrong track when we were teenagers.

Mum was the backbone of our family. She kept us together and sane. We could have gone off the rails otherwise, and done stupid things like a lot of kids in the neighbourhood. Luckily, we led normal lives and I only ever wanted to go to the sports clubs.

I was never given anything easy in sport and standards were generally high. Alwyn Pichanick, who later became Zimbabwe Cricket’s honorary life president, was the selector for the junior national cricket team. He said to me, ‘Young man, we’re going to go and play in Northern Transvaal; I’m going to take you. You are my wicketkeeper, but I’m going to ask you if you can come down as the thirteenth man, because I want to give this other youngster a chance as a wicketkeeper.’ His name was David Houghton.

David would go on to captain Zimbabwe at Test level and have a top-class coaching career in England. But back then he was a round-faced, chubby little lad; one of those when you see the kid you think, oh, he can’t run; but he ended up playing both goalkeeper and wicketkeeper and he was good at both. We were going down by train from Salisbury, all the way to Pretoria. The journey took two nights. That was the really exciting part. Especially since the junior hockey girls were on the train as well. However, they put the dining compartment in between ours and their cars, so you couldn’t get to them – unless you got on top of the roof…

Pichanick was a legend. He was the boss and saw something in David Houghton and let him have the game instead of me. So when we went down there we had three games; David played two of them behind the stumps and I played one, just to try and even it out.

My passion earned me a place in the national team in three different sports at a young age. In rugby I was the youngest fly-half at the high school. Aged fourteen I was playing against sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds. They knew I played cricket for my country, so they knew I could play baseball as well. I loved the game and it gave me the opportunity to travel all over southern Africa; I represented both my province and then Rhodesia in a mini-series against South Africa. I was that annoying kid in your class who could play any ball game better than everyone else. Later, I was offered a baseball scholarship in the United States at North Adams College in Massachusetts, but that was after I had left the army and committed my future to the third sport at which I represented Rhodesia – football.

*

IN THE EVENINGS I USED TO SNEAK INTO THE PLAYING FIELDS OF MY old primary school, David Livingstone, and play football there as they had proper goals. One day I was messing about with two of my buddies, a little chap called John Voight and another youngster called Mark Chapman. On the far side of the field, across the road, there was a car.

We’d been playing for an hour and this car hadn’t moved. We had a break to get some water and when we started playing again, we saw a man in a white shirt and black pants climb through the fence of the school grounds and walk the length of the football pitch. When he reached us he said, ‘Excuse me, young man, can I have a word?’ I thought we were going to get into trouble; I thought he might be a teacher telling us we couldn’t play on the school fields. But he said, ‘Listen, young man, I would like you to come and play for Salisbury Callies.’

He turned out to be Dave Russell, the Scotsman who coached Salisbury Callies under-14s. Salisbury Callies were the only white professional club in the Rhodesia National League, the best quality league in the country at the time. They were all white and virtually all Scottish, but their participation against black and Coloured teams was demonstrative of how racial barriers were starting to break down in this period. (‘Coloured’ is a name used to denote those of mixed race in southern Africa; it’s a distinct ethnic grouping and the ancestry is linked to mixed marriages between Khoisan women and European settlers in the seventeenth century.) They had won everything in sight when competing in the white leagues so they decided to challenge themselves and enter the black domain.

I was fourteen years of age and I said, ‘I don’t think my mother will allow that.’

‘Well, where do you live? I’ll come and ask your mother now.’

‘Just down the road – Livingstone Avenue, number ninety-nine; I’ll meet you there.’

So I jumped on my bike, the two other guys jumped on theirs, we rode through the school grounds, out of the front gate, down the road, and sure enough he’s parked at 99 Livingstone Avenue. I took him up and said, ‘Mum, this gentleman wants to speak to you, please.’

‘I’d like for your son to come and play for Salisbury Callies.’

‘Is that the soccer team?’ she replied.

‘Yes, I’ve been watching your son and I think that he is pretty good.’

‘I cannot afford the fees for him to go to Salisbury Callies. He plays soccer for Raylton and we don’t pay there.’

‘No, don’t worry about his fees; I’ll pay his fees. I want him to come and play for Salisbury Callies.’

Only when the club promised to pay the affiliation fee and travel expenses to matches plus two dollars for every victory and one for a draw did she agree. My eyes bulged: this was quite a lot of money for a fourteen-year-old.

That’s how I started my route to professional football. When I got to my first training session, there was a familiar round face as the goalkeeper playing for the under-16s: David Houghton, my cricketing mate. The same guy that I went down to Pretoria to play Rhodesian cricket with, the boy who was given a chance by Alwyn Pichanick to play two out of the three games instead of me, was a goalkeeper for Salisbury Callies too.

We trained the Tuesday and the Thursday, and then on the Sunday morning when the game was going to be played, Dave Russell said, ‘David, you’re sitting out now. Bruce Grobbelaar, you’re going to go in goal.’

That was a pivotal moment for both of our careers: David became the Rhodesian wicketkeeper and I became a goalkeeper for Salisbury Callies. It shows how fortune can play a part in the paths we take.

Fortune made me go down the football path rather than the cricket path. I could have made a career out of cricket too, but then I would never have seen all these beautiful places that I’ve been to with football in the world. With cricket I’d have been stuck going to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand. That’s it. With football I’ve gone everywhere; all these magical islands – Cayman Islands, St Kitts, Trinidad and Tobago, Mauritius, Madagascar. I’ve been all over. So would I change it? No.

Ten months after being taken from the wicket and put in goal, aged just fourteen years and eleven months, I would make my first-team debut for Salisbury Callies. For the junior teams at Callies, you’d get attendances ranging from 40 to 200 depending on the age group: the higher the age group, the more interest. The under-14s would kick off in the morning, then the under-16s at midday and the under-18s at around 2pm, all using the same pitch in the stadium. By the time the first team kicked off in late afternoon, more than 2,000 would be in attendance.